List Price: $1,075,000List Price: $1,075,000List Price: $1,075,000
List Price: $1,075,000
The Property: Built in 1888 when the mid–South Side was very fashionable, this greystone townhouse was dilapidated and fronted by chain-link fencing in May 2002. That’s when Tim and Lynne Rinkoski, moving from Downers Grove into the city, decided to make it their next restoration project. “It was the best-looking deserted house on…
Plus: a video walk-through with Dennis
As more homeowners and builders fall into foreclosure, many of the properties they let go of wind up on the auction block, where house hunters willing to do some advance legwork can land some terrific bargains. “It’s not the house’s fault or the condo’s fault that it’s being auctioned,” says Rick Levin, the head of the Chicago real-estate auction firm Rick Levin & Associates. “It’s typically the owners’…
List Price: $1,199,000
Sale Price: $1,300,000
The Property: The buyer of this 15-room house in Burr Ridge got a real bargain, even though the house, left unfinished by the builder who lost it to foreclosure, lacks a few essentials. For instance, it still needs shower doors and a door between the garage and the house, and the builder removed the kitchen appliances and some light fixtures prior to giving title to the bank. And while…
List Price: $2,773,000
The Property: The quintessential center-entry Colonial, this Kenilworth house stood in as the warm family home Steve Martin’s weary, irritable character desperately wanted to reach in time for Thanksgiving dinner in the 1987 movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles. “If I had a big life-sized photo of Steve Martin, I would put it in the window every Thanksgiving,” says Jeanie Schneider, who bought the house in 1996 with her husband, Wes. “Every Halloween, children come to the door and ask…
In May 2005, the managers and residents of AIDSCare, a Lake View hospice, were startled to learn that they had 90 days to move out of the dilapidated mansion and coach house they had shared with an order of nuns for a dozen years. The nuns were members of the Society of Helpers of the … Read more
List Price: $1,599,000
Sale Price: $1,300,000
The Property: The architect Frederick Phillips designed this simple but striking house in 2000 for his widowed, 80-something mother, Katherine Bennett, who had lived nearby in a renovated 19th-century barn for four decades. “She only needed a few rooms,” says Phillips, “but she had always cherished her views of the woods around her.” Phillips designed a house that put all his mother’s needs—kitchen, living and dining room, bedroom, bathroom, and a big deck—on the second floor, with windows all around and elevator access from the…
List Price: $6.3 million
The Property: Brian Baetz and his company, the Lemont-based Morgan Builders, have been putting up houses and entire subdivisions in the west and southwest suburbs for two decades. But this six-bedroom, 9,300-square-foot house, which was completed in November in Hinsdale, is Baetz’s pet project. Inspired by the centuries-old homes outside Paris, it is a repository of . . .
PLUS: a bonus video – walking tour with the builder
Irene Pritzker, the former wife of Robert Pritzker—who, with his brother Jay, turned a family fortune into a financial empire best known for its Hyatt hotels and resorts—has sold her 13-room Kenilworth mansion for $2,775,000. A handsome brick and limestone villa roofed in green terra cotta and situated on four-tenths of an acre, it has five bedrooms and a…
Southeast Condo – List Price: $4.95M – Sale Price: $4.95M
Northeast Condo- List Price: $4.65M – Sale Price: $4.7M
The Properties: Two adjacent nine-room penthouses occupying parts of the 59th and 60th floors of the Millennium Centre (at 33 West Ontario Street) sold over the past few weeks, each for more than $4 million. Although the penthouses went to separate buyers, their sales were connected. Only the northeast penthouse was on the market in November, when two different buyers showed strong interest, says Steve Graf, the @Properties agent who was representing that unit. So he approached the owner of….
List Price: $749,000
The Property: This four-bedroom condo occupies the top (fourth) floor of a nondescript building on busy Pulaski Avenue in Chicago’s Old Irving Park neighborhood. But once the private elevator ascends and the doors open on a Chinese red foyer decorated with beads and vases, the commonplace has clearly been left behind. Off to the left…
